research

IBM and Research in Motion are expanding the reach of IBM's Lotus software onto BlackBerry handsets.

BlackBerry users in companies committed to IBM's Lotus suite of software can now access the Lotus Connections software from their handhelds, the companies plan to announce Wednesday at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando, Fla. Lotus-equipped companies have long been able to deliver e-mail, contacts, and calendar appointments to BlackBerry users, but companies can now allow their workers to get Web 2.0-ified in a safe, staid manner formally approved by the IT department.

Lotus Connections lets you pick the brains of … Read more

Research in Motion will hold its own conference for smartphone developers later this year, as interest in mobile development continues to grow.

Electronista spotted a Web page advertising the BlackBerry Developer Conference, scheduled for the week of October 20 in Santa Clara, Calif. The two-and-a-half day conference will feature the usual keynote speeches and technical sessions, but RIM doesn't seem to have settled on an agenda just yet.

Smartphone application development appears to be the next frontier for software developers. Such applications have already been in development for years for operating systems like Symbian and Windows Mobile, but the … Read more

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is working with three other companies to launch a $150 million venture capital fund that will invest in companies developing new applications and services for mobile devices.

Electronic publisher Thomson Reuters and venture capital firms JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners have joined RIM to establish the fund. RIM said the fund won't be restricted to investing in BlackBerry-specific applications. It will also invest in start-ups as well as relatively mature software developers.

Specifically, investments will focus on services and applications such as mobile payments, advertising, retailing, and banking. It also will support companies … Read more

Following its massive overhaul earlier this year, HP Labs will begin a more formal and focused program doing collaborative research with universities.

Beginning Wednesday, the research and development arm of Hewlett-Packard will begin accepting proposals from university researchers anywhere in the world.

Proposals will be accepted until mid-June, then judged and awarded in the fall. The winners will receive a grant ranging from $50,000 to $75,000, which is enough for each professor who wins to hire at least one graduate student, according to HP's Office of Open Innovation.

"In the past, we did a lot of … Read more

Founded to two MIT Media Lab alums, The Echo Nest is focused on what it calls "music intelligence." The company is developing software technology that can analyze the sounds within music files, text within online articles and blog postings about music, and other online data (such as songs being downloaded in a particular week). It will then license this technology to developers--commercial and non-commercial--to help them create a whole new class of music software and Web applications.

It's possible to imagine hundreds of possibilities. A music company could build an application to identify current trends in order … Read more

Research in Motion is teaming up with SAP to integrate key enterprise software onto its Blackberry devices in a move that could mobilize business applications in the same way it did for corporate e-mail.

The two companies said Friday at a joint press conference in New York City that SAP's customer relationship management software will be natively integrated into BlackBerry devices. This means that sales professionals will be able to access their CRM application as readily as they get e-mail on their BlackBerrys.

RIM and SAP had already offered customers a browser-based solution for accessing CRM applications. But this … Read more

Intel officially still rules the graphics chip market. But an arcane-sounding statistic called "double-attach" may redefine the chipmaker's standing.

First, the official first-quarter graphics chip market share numbers. Total shipments for Q1 were 95 million units, down 5.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 and up 20 percent over the same period in the previous year, according to Jon Peddie Research.

"Traditionally, the first quarter has flat to negative growth for the computer industry as retailers and OEMs sell what's left from the holiday season. The quarter saw the biggest drop since 2005,&… Read more

If you want to know staphylococcal enterotoxin from streptococcal exotoxin, consider adding the Borden Institute's latest edition of Medical Aspects of Biological Warfare to your nightstand.

This scholarly tome is an authoritative update on the weaponization of biological agents. A distinguished group of authors take us from familiar standbys (anthrax, plague, smallpox) through the potential horrors of inadvertent or deliberate release of "oranimal"--bioengineed plant organisms--and onto the "arbitrary use of human embryonic tissue in research."

An update from the 1997 edition was required because of the increased threat posed by biological warfare and terrorism, … Read more

PALO ALTO, Calif.--It looks and feels like a square, yellow crayon.

But it's actually a lot more sophisticated than that. It's ink in solid form (aptly called "solid ink") made of a polymeric resin, and Xerox researchers are using it, combined with advances in print head technology to make a greener printer.

Solid ink is different from what's used in the average desktop printer. Instead of buying cartridges filled with liquid ink, which are inserted into small print heads that race back and forth to transfer an image to paper, solid ink is melted, … Read more